The current model for making sand is pretty simple. Start with a mountain, a big sucker of a rock. Then the daily transition between warm day time and colder night time, and between hotter summer and colder winter will cause expansion and contraction of the rock, gradually over long periods of time opening small cracks.

Again over time, water will fill the cracks and when it freezes enlarge the cracks, eventually breaking off pieces.

Again, over time the pieces are transported from higher elevations to lower ones by wind, water and gravity. During transportation they are broken up further, becoming smaller and smaller pieces.

Nothing is needed other than processes we can see at work today and lots of time.

God just created the loam content right in the soil... And sand too...

Or Hovinds giant comet brought all the sand, or it was trapped in the ice/water canopy...

The massive tectonic activities during the flood could have ground up all the uhh... silicates, to make sand.

I tried, I can't it work though.

"Debate is an art form. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with establishing fact — which creationists have mastered. Some of those rules are: never say anything positive about your own position because it can be attacked, but chip away at what appear to be the weaknesses in your opponent's position. They are good at that. I don't think I could beat the creationists at debate. I can tie them. But in courtrooms they are terrible, because in courtrooms you cannot give speeches. In a courtroom you have to answer direct questions about the positive status of your belief. We destroyed them in Arkansas. On the second day of the two-week trial we had our victory party!"-Stephen Jay Gould

Just to be pedantic, this isn't the only means to make sand.There are a few different weathering mechanisms that can break down rock. Some are physical like you describe, but there are also chemical processes that can break down cements and grains, allowing others to be released. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on it. Erosion by wind, water or ice (more to the point, the material carried by it) can also get grains from a weathered or unweathered surface.

When we pick up a handful of sand from the beach and watch it sift through our fingers, we are seeing the product of millions of years of geologic history

YECers never mention what wonderful aspect of the world wide flood was suppose to create huge (really huge) deposits of sand. Of all the mechanisms involved in the generation of sand a flood would only supply mechanical action as in high velocity stream flows - there were no freeze/thaw cycles.

However the flood is a 40 day event (or a year if you like). The events from such a flood would be sporadic and not sustained and could not therefore be capable of generated huge deposits of uniform sand.

For some empirical evidence, I live on the great Missoula flood plain. This was a cataclysmic event that that sent a wall of water initially 2000 ft high at speeds approaching 100 mph across Idaho Washington and Oregon. The city of Portland was once under 250 ft of water from this flood. Incredibly there is evidence that this Ice Age flood event occurred approximately 40 separate times on a cycle of roughly 50 years.

And guess what? There is very little sand to be found, our beaches are typically of course gravels and large boulders.

But it gets more impossible for the "young earth model" . . .

In reading the above reference article i learned (yeah I don't travel much) that many tropical beaches are almost 100% of biological origin - consisting of fragments of marine invertebrates and even plants products.

Now consider the number of generations of animals that would be required to create such immense deposits. Also many of these deposits are in the process of being recycled as these shells erode and dissolve back to the sea.

But then there is the issue of biological derived sand. Was this sand created in the form of deceased little critters?

Also there is the issue of large deposits of sand where the source rock formations are suspiciously right next door. If God made sand out of nothing why does he so often make sand when the base rock is close by.

I did some search and found nothing on the flood model for the formation of sand. I wonder what mechanism of the flood was responsible for generating the vast deposits of sand we have. The Sahara today consists of some 3,500,000 square miles of sand which in turn is dwarfed by the continent scale Old Red Sandstone formation with a thickness in places of over 10000 ft.

I suppose if pushed YECers would have to resort to sand being made in the creation week.

Lots of sand in the Sahara, yes, but it may have formed fairly quickly. I'm sure that there are plenty of examples elsewhere that would cause greater problems for young earthers, like your sandstone one.

quote:One of the most striking climate changes of the past 11,000 years caused the abrupt desertification of the Saharan and Arabia regions midway through that period. The resulting loss of the Sahara to agricultural pursuits may be an important reason that civilizations were founded along the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates.